7 ms·

How much more energy can these large blades produce that it's worth inventing a new kind of airplane (and apparently a purpose-built airstrip for every destinat

How much more energy can these large blades produce that it's worth inventing a new kind of airplane (and apparently a purpose-built airstrip for every destination) to ship them? And if they ever break and need fixing, do you have to go pick them up, take them in for repair, and bring them back? If they've raised $100M+, I assume these questions have been asked, but I'm just generally skeptical that the math makes sense.

biomcgary 3y ago
Why not an airship at this scale?
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I was thinking the same, like the Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) Airlander 10.
- joak 3y ago
  They cannot land when it's windy
  - usrusr 3y ago
    When wind is faster than their maximum speed. Chances are they can take much higher wind speed than the elaborate truck ballet required to transport huge blades on the ground. Wind turbine installation isn't exactly an all-weather project as is.
- simne 3y ago
  Support become very costly, because need very large hangars and special machines for large craft (Ukrainian Ruslans and Mriya was designed as off-road, and carry few tons of special equipment onboard, which is not good for economy). Second problem landing strips, which also are limited (limited length, limited width). As example, for small size and narrow-body planes, in US there are more than 6000 private airstrips, so they could nearly substitute automobiles, but if need landing strip for something large, they are only at very large airports and in special places, like military airbases and space centers, so just few for whole country. In the world, things are worse than in US, so most Antonov planes was designed to fly from ground road, and carry special equipment on board, but this made them less effective.
  - almostnormal 3y ago
    > Second problem landing strips, which also are limited (limited length, limited width). Direct-to-tower delivery. Removes the need for transport on the ground for the last miles and the need for a crane.
    - simne 3y ago
      That is problem. You sure could make tiny strip (10m x 250m), nearly everywhere, even at the center of old city. But large planes need much larger strips, for example typical international airport have strip 30m x 1600m. Why so much difference, because economy. It is much more effective to make large strips in large cities (or near them), than to make off-road planes (google Bush plane) which will have much more expensive cost to transport weight-kilometer or passenger-kilometer. From where become expensiveness. Well, most effective planes flight fast at high atmosphere (because speed of sound is significantly higher in low pressure), but they also have high landing speed, and unfortunately, brakes (very similar to automobile) need to dissipate all energy from speed, calculated from simple formula (m*v^2)/2, so with double speed have quadruple energy. Energy dissipation from plane brakes is really big problem, so big that nearly all big planes have special "thermo-accumulating" weights inside landing gear, which considered to heat fast when braking and then few hours dissipate heat. Extreme example was Concord, on which brakes cooling about 11 hours after landing. Bush planes are slow, so they don't have this problem. Second problem, because of engineering considerations (physics), large planes usually are tall, but not too wide inside, and very big loads are just considered to transport in "horseman" configuration, mean load placed on top of plane, so need special crane to load/unload.
      - almostnormal 3y ago
        GGGP was suggesting use of an airship.
        simne 3y ago
        And who will build network of hangars for it? Aliens?
vipshek 3y ago
From the article: > Radia estimates the larger turbines could reduce the cost of energy by up to 35% and increase the consistency of power generation by 20% compared with today’s onshore turbines. Not sure what that translates to in terms of energy output over time. As for the sibling "Why not airships?" question, the article says: > Blimps can’t land in windy conditions. Helicopters are more costly than airplanes, and flying with a dangling blade designed to catch wind would prove complex and dangerous.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Does this cost reduction factor in the cost of making a new airplane company? If they transport a million blades then the cost per blade is not that high. But if they only make 10,000 blades then it becomes more of a factor (especially if the useful life turns out to be not as long as predicted).
  - youngtaff 3y ago
    Plus how long does each turbine need to operate for before it mitigates the CO2 and other pollutants produced by building and operating the plane?
    - Retric 3y ago
      If they move 3,000 blades for ~10MW turbines then a 20% improvement in capacity factor alone is worth 3,066,000 metric tons of CO2 year. Edit: (Ops 10Mw * 1,000 turbines * 0.5 tons from natural gas /MW * .35% capacity factor * 20% improvement * 24 * 365 hours, coal is roughly double that.) By comparison a commercial jet takes ~20 years to emit 1 million tons of CO2. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-jets-contribute-1-mln-tonnes-co2-emissions-each-data-2021-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-je...
    - myrmidon 3y ago
      Assuming: 500tons of fuel for the transport of the 3 blades (comparison: AN225 with higher max payload weight guzzled ~15tons/hour). You could have used that energy to produce 500000kg * 40MJ/kg * 40% = 8TJ. The turbine would need ~40d to produce this (~25% capacity factor, 10MW nameplate power): 8TJ / (10[MW] * 25% * 3600[s/h] * 24[h/d])
baseline-shift 3y ago
We are headed for 20 MW now, so a wind farm with five 20 MW turbines is a typical size for many gas power plants; 100 MW. In the EU, there's testing facilities that are checking these at this 20 MW size now. Commercially at this point there's up to 17 MW operating in the North Sea.
- noneeeed 3y ago
  That's awesome. I hadn't realised we were close to 20MW ones now. The Halide ones being installed in the North Sea are monsters, amazing engineering. I'm pretty pessimistic about climate change. But the way wind and solar just keep getting cheaper and better gives me a certain amount of hope.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Solar keeps getting cheaper. Wind has kind of hit a roadblock - probably because it can’t be made in China.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Solar keeps getting cheaper. Wind has kind of hit a roadblock - there is less innovation coming China than for solar.
    - _ph_ 3y ago
      Very different things. There is basically only one solar panel size on the market. Which starts at $100. Making large solar installations means just getting more panels. This is great for cost reduction, as that most of the times goes along with ramping up production numbers. The production of the single panel doesn't get more complex though. Wind energy is also getting constantly cheaper, both due to cost reductions and due to making the wind generators larger and thus more efficient. Onshore wind energy is the cheapest in Middle Europe and if they could grow further, costs would go down accordingly. But even if production can deliver, getting the blades gets more and more difficult, so here we area.
    - davedx 3y ago
Arrath 3y ago
> (and apparently a purpose-built airstrip for every destination) Having built a 64-turbine windfarm back in the 2000's (so they were likely smaller than they are now) a goodly chunk of the work involved was site prep in building access roads traversable by the cranes required to set everything up, and the massively over-length trailers carrying the blades. Things like maximum grade, radius of the turns, breakover angle etc were hugely important. Grading out and paving an airstrip when you already have an appreciable contingent of heavy earthworking equipment onsite and, likely, also a concrete batch plant to reduce the travel time for the concrete you're using for the foundations really isn't too big of a stretch!
- opwieurposiu 3y ago
  Their website says it can land on a packed dirt airstrip, 6000ft long. I wonder if they would park all the nearby windmills during takeoff/landing, to avoid creating swirly air.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    Turbulence created by the blades is negligible to a large plane. Planes this big can easily fly into hurricanes [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_WP-3D_Orion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_WP-3D_Orion
    - CPLX 3y ago
      There aren't any planes that can fly easily into hurricanes.
      - lovemenot 3y ago
        All planes can easily fly into a hurricane.
  - ultrarunner 3y ago
    At this size the plane's swirly air (wake turbulence) would be a more significant concern
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
The alt energy transition needs some SERIOUSLY LARGE scale. I wish I had a super-caps lock for that. The fact that a custom transport plane and dedicated landing strip for massive wind farms is economically feasible should give you a hint as to what is at stake. For review, both wind and solar, allegedly with storage bundled in and without subsidies, is cheaper than the next cheapest (and fossil fuel based) generation method: natural gas turbine, per LCOE numbers from Lazard LAST YEAR. Natural gas turbine is basically topped out in terms of efficiency and cost, I believe they have already exceeded Carnot efficiency with downstream exhaust heat capture and other maximization techniques. They can't go lower. Wind? Likely has a decade of gradual cost improvement. Solar? Successful integration of perovskites might drop prices 50% or more in the next decade, plus usual economy of scale improvement. The economics are basically settled. The details are massive scale, load leveling, grid adaptation.
- schoen 3y ago
  Doesn't the Carnot engine capture the absolute thermodynamic optimum for extracting usable energy from a hot object? How do you beat it?
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    Well, yes. If you have a combustion engine or a turbine, Carnot tells you exactly the maximal efficiency you could achieve. But the exhaust still can be used for residental heating. So while the generator doesn't get any more efficient at producing electricity, you can use the heat which drives up the overall gain of operating the generator.
thsksbd 3y ago
As a first order approximation, power scales as the square of the radius. Of course, problems can scale faster the quadratically, transportation is one of them.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Power actually scales better than the square of the radius, because there is more wind at greater height.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    And real nimby impact (as opposed to the impact imagined) scales much less than quadratic, because larger rotor implies lower rpm and rpm has a huge impact on perception. Small rotors emit a very strong "presence" when you are anywhere near, whereas the tallest ones feel as if they are on a different plane of existence even when you are standing right at the base. Certainly not quite as disconnected from reality as airliners passing by at cruising level, but it's a similar effect.
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    Thats linear scaling [1] so its still scaling quadratically. Ax^2 + Bx is a quadratic, after all! (Also, shouldn't the first order approx should neglect wind speed as a function of height?) [1] actually worse. From Wiki entry for "Wind Gradient" "Although the power law exponent approximation is convenient, it has no theoretical basis.[18] When the temperature profile is adiabatic, the wind speed should vary logarithmically with height,[19] Measurements over open terrain in 1961 showed good agreement with the logarithmic fit up to 100 m or so, with near constant average wind speed up through 1000 m.[20]"
dimensional_dan 3y ago
Maybe make them seaplanes if making airports is too expensive? I just want to bring seaplanes back any way we can really ;)
- _ph_ 3y ago
  Well, for any coastal location, you can just take a ship.
fragmede 3y ago
What is the smaller version of this? Just like I can buy a small solar panel that is able to charge a battery that I can then use to charge my phone. Is there a small windmill I can buy that can do a couple hundred watts?
- _ph_ 3y ago
  There are small windmills available for purchase. For a while campers and sailing yachts would use them. But they seem to go out of fashion. The problem is: the efficiency goes up with the size also, there is more wind the higher you go. On top of all of that, windmills are quite noisy. You really cannot use them in residential areas. Solar cells are much easier these days and also cheaper.
7952 3y ago
The financial side is not just about energy output alone but includes other constraints and opportunities. A developer may get access to cheaper land and untapped wind resource or grid connection opportunities. A single project like that could make a lot of money. And critically it could be packaged into an opportunity that could be sold to banks and investors. Opening up new opportunities could easily justify a few tens of million in delivery costs.

biomcgary 3y ago

Why not an airship at this scale?

karmakaze 3y ago
I was thinking the same, like the Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) Airlander 10.
joak 3y ago
They cannot land when it's windy
- usrusr 3y ago
  When wind is faster than their maximum speed. Chances are they can take much higher wind speed than the elaborate truck ballet required to transport huge blades on the ground. Wind turbine installation isn't exactly an all-weather project as is.
simne 3y ago
Support become very costly, because need very large hangars and special machines for large craft (Ukrainian Ruslans and Mriya was designed as off-road, and carry few tons of special equipment onboard, which is not good for economy). Second problem landing strips, which also are limited (limited length, limited width). As example, for small size and narrow-body planes, in US there are more than 6000 private airstrips, so they could nearly substitute automobiles, but if need landing strip for something large, they are only at very large airports and in special places, like military airbases and space centers, so just few for whole country. In the world, things are worse than in US, so most Antonov planes was designed to fly from ground road, and carry special equipment on board, but this made them less effective.
- almostnormal 3y ago
  > Second problem landing strips, which also are limited (limited length, limited width). Direct-to-tower delivery. Removes the need for transport on the ground for the last miles and the need for a crane.
  - simne 3y ago
    That is problem. You sure could make tiny strip (10m x 250m), nearly everywhere, even at the center of old city. But large planes need much larger strips, for example typical international airport have strip 30m x 1600m. Why so much difference, because economy. It is much more effective to make large strips in large cities (or near them), than to make off-road planes (google Bush plane) which will have much more expensive cost to transport weight-kilometer or passenger-kilometer. From where become expensiveness. Well, most effective planes flight fast at high atmosphere (because speed of sound is significantly higher in low pressure), but they also have high landing speed, and unfortunately, brakes (very similar to automobile) need to dissipate all energy from speed, calculated from simple formula (m*v^2)/2, so with double speed have quadruple energy. Energy dissipation from plane brakes is really big problem, so big that nearly all big planes have special "thermo-accumulating" weights inside landing gear, which considered to heat fast when braking and then few hours dissipate heat. Extreme example was Concord, on which brakes cooling about 11 hours after landing. Bush planes are slow, so they don't have this problem. Second problem, because of engineering considerations (physics), large planes usually are tall, but not too wide inside, and very big loads are just considered to transport in "horseman" configuration, mean load placed on top of plane, so need special crane to load/unload.
    - almostnormal 3y ago
      GGGP was suggesting use of an airship.
      - simne 3y ago
        And who will build network of hangars for it? Aliens?

vipshek 3y ago

From the article: > Radia estimates the larger turbines could reduce the cost of energy by up to 35% and increase the consistency of power generation by 20% compared with today’s onshore turbines. Not sure what that translates to in terms of energy output over time. As for the sibling "Why not airships?" question, the article says: > Blimps can’t land in windy conditions. Helicopters are more costly than airplanes, and flying with a dangling blade designed to catch wind would prove complex and dangerous.

gnicholas 3y ago
Does this cost reduction factor in the cost of making a new airplane company? If they transport a million blades then the cost per blade is not that high. But if they only make 10,000 blades then it becomes more of a factor (especially if the useful life turns out to be not as long as predicted).
- youngtaff 3y ago
  Plus how long does each turbine need to operate for before it mitigates the CO2 and other pollutants produced by building and operating the plane?
  - Retric 3y ago
    If they move 3,000 blades for ~10MW turbines then a 20% improvement in capacity factor alone is worth 3,066,000 metric tons of CO2 year. Edit: (Ops 10Mw * 1,000 turbines * 0.5 tons from natural gas /MW * .35% capacity factor * 20% improvement * 24 * 365 hours, coal is roughly double that.) By comparison a commercial jet takes ~20 years to emit 1 million tons of CO2. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-jets-contribute-1-mln-tonnes-co2-emissions-each-data-2021-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-je...
  - myrmidon 3y ago
    Assuming: 500tons of fuel for the transport of the 3 blades (comparison: AN225 with higher max payload weight guzzled ~15tons/hour). You could have used that energy to produce 500000kg * 40MJ/kg * 40% = 8TJ. The turbine would need ~40d to produce this (~25% capacity factor, 10MW nameplate power): 8TJ / (10[MW] * 25% * 3600[s/h] * 24[h/d])

baseline-shift 3y ago

We are headed for 20 MW now, so a wind farm with five 20 MW turbines is a typical size for many gas power plants; 100 MW. In the EU, there's testing facilities that are checking these at this 20 MW size now. Commercially at this point there's up to 17 MW operating in the North Sea.

noneeeed 3y ago
That's awesome. I hadn't realised we were close to 20MW ones now. The Halide ones being installed in the North Sea are monsters, amazing engineering. I'm pretty pessimistic about climate change. But the way wind and solar just keep getting cheaper and better gives me a certain amount of hope.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Solar keeps getting cheaper. Wind has kind of hit a roadblock - probably because it can’t be made in China.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Solar keeps getting cheaper. Wind has kind of hit a roadblock - there is less innovation coming China than for solar.
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    Very different things. There is basically only one solar panel size on the market. Which starts at $100. Making large solar installations means just getting more panels. This is great for cost reduction, as that most of the times goes along with ramping up production numbers. The production of the single panel doesn't get more complex though. Wind energy is also getting constantly cheaper, both due to cost reductions and due to making the wind generators larger and thus more efficient. Onshore wind energy is the cheapest in Middle Europe and if they could grow further, costs would go down accordingly. But even if production can deliver, getting the blades gets more and more difficult, so here we area.
  - davedx 3y ago

Arrath 3y ago

> (and apparently a purpose-built airstrip for every destination) Having built a 64-turbine windfarm back in the 2000's (so they were likely smaller than they are now) a goodly chunk of the work involved was site prep in building access roads traversable by the cranes required to set everything up, and the massively over-length trailers carrying the blades. Things like maximum grade, radius of the turns, breakover angle etc were hugely important. Grading out and paving an airstrip when you already have an appreciable contingent of heavy earthworking equipment onsite and, likely, also a concrete batch plant to reduce the travel time for the concrete you're using for the foundations really isn't too big of a stretch!

opwieurposiu 3y ago
Their website says it can land on a packed dirt airstrip, 6000ft long. I wonder if they would park all the nearby windmills during takeoff/landing, to avoid creating swirly air.
- throwup238 3y ago
  Turbulence created by the blades is negligible to a large plane. Planes this big can easily fly into hurricanes [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_WP-3D_Orion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_WP-3D_Orion
  - CPLX 3y ago
    There aren't any planes that can fly easily into hurricanes.
    - lovemenot 3y ago
      All planes can easily fly into a hurricane.
- ultrarunner 3y ago
  At this size the plane's swirly air (wake turbulence) would be a more significant concern

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

The alt energy transition needs some SERIOUSLY LARGE scale. I wish I had a super-caps lock for that. The fact that a custom transport plane and dedicated landing strip for massive wind farms is economically feasible should give you a hint as to what is at stake. For review, both wind and solar, allegedly with storage bundled in and without subsidies, is cheaper than the next cheapest (and fossil fuel based) generation method: natural gas turbine, per LCOE numbers from Lazard LAST YEAR. Natural gas turbine is basically topped out in terms of efficiency and cost, I believe they have already exceeded Carnot efficiency with downstream exhaust heat capture and other maximization techniques. They can't go lower. Wind? Likely has a decade of gradual cost improvement. Solar? Successful integration of perovskites might drop prices 50% or more in the next decade, plus usual economy of scale improvement. The economics are basically settled. The details are massive scale, load leveling, grid adaptation.

schoen 3y ago
Doesn't the Carnot engine capture the absolute thermodynamic optimum for extracting usable energy from a hot object? How do you beat it?
- _ph_ 3y ago
  Well, yes. If you have a combustion engine or a turbine, Carnot tells you exactly the maximal efficiency you could achieve. But the exhaust still can be used for residental heating. So while the generator doesn't get any more efficient at producing electricity, you can use the heat which drives up the overall gain of operating the generator.

thsksbd 3y ago

As a first order approximation, power scales as the square of the radius. Of course, problems can scale faster the quadratically, transportation is one of them.

adrianN 3y ago
Power actually scales better than the square of the radius, because there is more wind at greater height.
- usrusr 3y ago
  And real nimby impact (as opposed to the impact imagined) scales much less than quadratic, because larger rotor implies lower rpm and rpm has a huge impact on perception. Small rotors emit a very strong "presence" when you are anywhere near, whereas the tallest ones feel as if they are on a different plane of existence even when you are standing right at the base. Certainly not quite as disconnected from reality as airliners passing by at cruising level, but it's a similar effect.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  Thats linear scaling [1] so its still scaling quadratically. Ax^2 + Bx is a quadratic, after all! (Also, shouldn't the first order approx should neglect wind speed as a function of height?) [1] actually worse. From Wiki entry for "Wind Gradient" "Although the power law exponent approximation is convenient, it has no theoretical basis.[18] When the temperature profile is adiabatic, the wind speed should vary logarithmically with height,[19] Measurements over open terrain in 1961 showed good agreement with the logarithmic fit up to 100 m or so, with near constant average wind speed up through 1000 m.[20]"

dimensional_dan 3y ago

Maybe make them seaplanes if making airports is too expensive? I just want to bring seaplanes back any way we can really ;)

_ph_ 3y ago
Well, for any coastal location, you can just take a ship.

fragmede 3y ago

What is the smaller version of this? Just like I can buy a small solar panel that is able to charge a battery that I can then use to charge my phone. Is there a small windmill I can buy that can do a couple hundred watts?

_ph_ 3y ago
There are small windmills available for purchase. For a while campers and sailing yachts would use them. But they seem to go out of fashion. The problem is: the efficiency goes up with the size also, there is more wind the higher you go. On top of all of that, windmills are quite noisy. You really cannot use them in residential areas. Solar cells are much easier these days and also cheaper.

7952 3y ago

The financial side is not just about energy output alone but includes other constraints and opportunities. A developer may get access to cheaper land and untapped wind resource or grid connection opportunities. A single project like that could make a lot of money. And critically it could be packaged into an opportunity that could be sold to banks and investors. Opening up new opportunities could easily justify a few tens of million in delivery costs.